Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is out with a piece this morning that sums up the realignment that has taken place in the American Electorate over the past two Presidential Elections. We did not believe it had happened, but last night’s Democrat +6 electorate – for the second election in a row – shows that it has:

HOT AIR – Ed Morrissey: In the final couple of weeks of the presidential campaign, we had a big debate over the nature of the American electorate, played out through polling criticism on both sides of the political divide. This came down to fundamental assumptions about which election cycle proved to be a realignment, and which turned out to be the anomaly. Many conservatives — myself among them, to be sure — operated on the assumption that the 2008 election had been the anomaly, driven by the fiscal crisis, and corrected in the 2010 midterm elections. The Left assumed that the fiscal crisis in 2008 had realigned the electorate toward greater government interventionism, and that the 2010 cycle was the anomaly, driven by a partisan fight over health care and the lack of a presidential contender at the top of the ticket.

Clearly, conservatives lost that argument last night, at least in large part, as John Ziegler wrote in the immediate aftermath. That was borne out by the final calculation in the exit polling as well as the vote itself. The partisan split in the electorate was 38/32/29, nearly identical to 2008. We argued that Barack Obama and Democrats couldn’t win a base turnout election again, but they did, as evidenced by Mitt Romney’s five-point win among independents, 50/45. Romney even lowered the gender gap from an Obama +14 in 2008 to Obama +4 in 2012, but that clearly wasn’t enough to overcome what now looks to be a significant realignment four years ago towards Democrats and not an anomaly. . . Read More